Title: The Countess

Opened at Cannes 2010 with availability slated on DVD

If you ride the New York subways you can’t help noticing an ad on most trains for the services of a Dr. Zizmor, a dermatologist who appears to specialize in smoothing facial wrinkles with his special creams and skillful hands. So what’s so bad about wrinkles? Wasn’t the Shar Pei dog in style years back particularly because of its creases and crinkles? In any case Julie Delpy wants to let us know graphically that well before the Botox age, even beyond America’s shores, beauty and youth have been inextricably linked. In “The Countess,” about a courtship more complex and formal than that related in “Before Sunset,” which Delpy co-wrote, the title character is a Hungarian noblewoman whose dates are 1560-1614. Presumably the broad information conveyed by the biopic is not simply a case of melodramatic writing but is true-to-life and does have the resonance of a vampire movie as well.

Erzebet Bathory, the title character of the movie and one who was given the sobriquet “The Blood Countess,” is a woman whose cruelty appears even as a child. In an opening, expository scene marred by extended voiceover, she buries a chick in soil, thereby suffocating the poor creature, then digs it up to find it dinner for worms. Past puberty, she is married off to an older man against her will, but after his death she attends a palace dance where she meets 21-year-old Istvan Thurzo (Daniel Bruhl), falls madly in love with him, but her desire to join the lad in matrimony is countered by the young man’s father, Count Thurzo (William Hurt). The count wants his son go travel to Denmark to marry the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Countess Erzebet Bathory, believing that the long absence of her loved one has to do with her age-related facial wrinkles and not with the machination of her would-be dad-in-law, discovers by accident (after beating a servant and drawing blood) that applying the blood of virgins to her face will smooth her skin. Strangely enough it does-for a while. We can see where the plot is going: virgins are sent for, peasants at first but then, the big mistake, aristocrats are utilized with new, improved methods of drawing blood. Justice demands that something be done to this vain woman-and it is.

Delpy does just fine when she’s writing about something close to her own life as in “Before Sunset,” but in this remote, bizarre story-despite the contemporary-sounding complication of a lesbian affair between the countess and her lover and the notion that wrinkles are bad at any time-there is a problem of dialogue. After the opening voiceover, generally a poor choice in dramas, we’re confronted with an assortment of accents from this international cast. The actors declaim their dialogue in faux Shakespearean formality lending the film the notion that it’s flirting with camp. Filmed in Berlin, “The Countess” also gives us blood on the battlefield as the Hungarians try to ward off the imperialistic Ottoman Turks. Beheadings and garroting take place and, in one case, and there’s even a scene involving the countess’ affair with a masochistic nobleman who loves whips and chains.

Martin Ruhe’s filming is muted, and Pierre-Yves Gayraud’s costumes are as expected. Countess, in your next life instead of looking for blood, go to Bloomingdale’s and spend some of the fortune you inherited on those $120 an ounce creams.

Unrated. 98 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Story: B+

Overall: C+